Updates at restokin: preparation, guides, & podcasts

So, there are a couple things that I have going on that I wanted to post updates about:

Preparing for the 4.0.1 patch (for both moonkin & resto druids)! This weekend, I hope to post about things like glyphs & gems that you should be acquiring before patch day hits. Not all of the glyphs will be available on patch day, but you will be able to set up with a temporary glyph set to get you started.

Both my healing and leveling guides will need a facelift the day that 4.0.1 hits the shelves. I will have something in place on release day, but neither will be a full guide, and the guides will stop at level 80 content. So, I will have a guide tailored to level 80 healing with the new talents (mostly with an explanation of what changed and how to deal with the new changes at 80 before mana becomes a problem). I will also have something resembling a 1 to 80 leveling guide ready to go at that point which will receive frequent updates as I have time and we get closer to Cata’s release.

Prior to cata’s release, I will get leveling guide updated for all 3 specs from 80 to 85 ready to go (along with probably getting the resto/bear instance healing/tanking leveling stuff ready to go, which won’t make it in for my 4.0 leveling guide). I will release a complete version for 85 resto healing after Cataclysm hits the shelves and we see how people are actually healing, and what the raid mechanics actually look like.

I believe that WoW is going to be migrating to new a new forum format, where we will have to start from scratch by re-posting all of our guides and such. Blizzard has done a WoW forum migration once before in previous patches, and has put Starcraft on the new forum format already. They haven’t announced anything about this lately, but I’m still anticipating the move. My leveling guide will likely move to the new forums first, and then the healing guide will follow after I get the leveling guide set up. All guides will also be cross-posted on the blog, and the blog will contain more updates as we work our way through the transition.

Oh, and this month is also Blizzcon, which I’ll be watching from home (since I didn’t get tickets). I’ll report on any big druid announcements over that weekend.

Now that you know my plan for the next ~3 months… I have a fun announcement!I’m planning on joining a bunch of my fellow druids in recording a Druid Roundtable podcast with the Raid Warning Podcast this NEXT weekend. (Date postponed another week...) There will be resto, feral, and moonkin druids. The lineup of people they sent the contact e-mails out to was a rather large list of big druid names from the community. We’ll be recording segments over this weekend, and they plan to release the podcast to everyone on Tuesday, the 5th in mid-October. I’ll let you guys know when it is posted, and will give you links and more info at that point. It won’t be recorded live due to how complicated it will be for the Raid Warning crew to coordinate so many different schedules.

Prior to the podcast, we’re supposed to ask for questions that people want answered. So, if you have a burning question you want discussed by the druid roundtable, you are welcome to put it in a comment to this post. You can also follow @RaidWarning on Twitter, and send your questions directly to them. In addition, if you are on twitter and are not following me (@restokin), you are also missing out on all my fun beta testing rants!

That’s all I have for now. Oh, and ontop of all of this, I’m supposed to be sending my advisor a draft of my dissertation proposal by the end of the weekend. Oh joy!

7 comments on “Updates at restokin: preparation, guides, & podcasts”

Regarding recent posts from Elitist Jerks regulars regarding the enhanced complexity of Boomkin rotation in Cata for optimal output, what are their thoughts on changes to playstyle for the upper level of playerbase? I’ve played Boomkin for over five years now and remember when it was difficult or impossible to get a raid spot. WotLK made things much better but I am still lagging behind “pures” in dps. I do not want to be just another utility pole for the pures in Cata, because everyone else gives the same types of buffs so all I can compete on is dps. See the following quotes:

[email protected] wrote:
These are some facets of optimal play that I thought about in the course of actually playing long enough to make that:
–Ideal DoT refresh time is between the second-last and last tick. So it’s a bit subtler to check for a DoT refresh on the next GCD than it is in WotLK, when you have to wait for the buff to go away.
–If a DoT refresh is coming up only 1 or 2 casts away from the relevant Eclipse, you want to wait until the first cast after the Eclipse to cast it.
–If a DoT refresh is coming up soon before the opposite Eclipse, you still might want to hold up briefly (depending on the duration of the other DoT) to get a timely Nature’s Torment proc after the Eclipse.
–If you think you’re two casts from Eclipse, you might proc immediately due to Euphoria. If you have an instant ready to get, you want to use it right in that gap to see whether Euphoria procced (similarly to the current technique of using instants to watch for Eclipse procs).
–Solar procs as soon as the last Starfire is done. Lunar has to wait for its travel time to proc after the last Wrath. Not only is it really easy to cast an extra Wrath until you get used to this, but it also means you have to be careful not to Moonfire before it lands.
–But, the travel time of the final Wrath is the ideal time to Starfall, because that doesn’t rely on Eclipse being up right as you you press the button.
–If you Starsurge once in Lunar, you have 5 energy left after casting 4 Starfires and still wind up with 5 Starfires.
–If at that moment when you’re at 5 energy, you Starsurge again, Eclipse won’t end right away. You can get 2 Eclipsed Starsurges and 5 Starfires in one Lunar. So if you get a Shooting Stars proc during Lunar, you want to use it this way.
–Same concept for Wrath, but again, you have to take the Wrath travel time into account to make sure you Starsurge at the right time.

[email protected] wrote:
Between trinket procs and Eclipses, the time to refresh dots is not entirely clear and it becomes problematic. Long duration dots (and MF extended by Starfire) only ensure that the dot refreshes do not line up cleanly and you need to make these decisions repeatedly. … As it is now, to be optimal is going to take a bit more tunneling than will be wise in a raid environment. So, we will be sub-optimal at best.

They haven’t sent me scheduled times for recording yet, so it’s not too late. They said they plan to break down recording sessions by spec & such, so it shouldn’t be too overwhelming, I think. It’ll more likely be multiple small group sessions (which they may actually break into two separate podcasts if having 4 roles to talk about ends up being a lot of airtime). You can listen to the other roundtables that they have done to see if the format will work out well for you or not. I’ve done enough guest podcast things that I’m getting used to it by now.

There might be 11 people on his e-mail list, but those are divided up across 4 different spec/role segements…

There’s something kind of fun about doing stuff that’s more public, but on the whole I have little enough patience with the WoW community at large that I don’t venture out of EJ too much. I’ve just never put effort into building myself a community presence like lots of the other people have with blogs and the like, and I always have some amount of skepticism at how truly substantive the discussions tend to be. It can definitely be something fun to do when I’m in the right mood though.

Well, I’m not an officer of my guild anymore because we had a guild split on Thursday and I moved to the new guild (Undying Resolution), and stepped down from that leadership role. So, that will take away at least some of the stress once things settle down from the move…. What will end up happening is that I will post pieces of things for 4.0.1 that aren’t complete, and then 4.0.3 will come with full versions of the guides.